


'Til I'm Spitting Blood

by hellgodsrus



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Reference To Past Injury, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream, band au, we do bones motherfucker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26783737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellgodsrus/pseuds/hellgodsrus
Summary: Being in an awesome metal band doesn't matter much if you're nearly late to show up. Or if your girlfriend and lead singer then murders you for being late.For the latest week of the People's Tomb fic jam prompt: Scream.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 17
Kudos: 89





	'Til I'm Spitting Blood

**Author's Note:**

> So... unlike everyone else, this is a fluffy fic. What can I say, I was thinking about what to do for this prompt and a song came on my iPod and... yeah, this happened. Uh, enjoy! Thanks again to Anna (and Elldritch!) for the beta work and to my beautiful, wonderful fiancee (Taylor) and my beautiful, wonderful girlfriend (Jess).

“You’re late.” 

Gideon, who five minutes ago had realised she would be really lucky if she only got there late and not _extremely_ late, and had then been delayed by Ianthe lurking outside the stage door of the venue like an annoying, oily ghost, did her best not to glare. “Yeah, I _know_.” 

Camilla was in full gear already; an impeccable pitch-black three piece suit - how the fuck she played like she did without chafing herself raw from sweating or pass out was a mystery for the fucking ages - with what looked like three bags of flour dropped over the top of her head. It was meant to be grave dirt or crypt dust or something because even if Camilla wouldn’t paint her face like a skull or buy a fancy mask like Corona, she was still committed to the theming. Even if it was, y’know, actually just flour. 

“Harrow’s changed the set-list three times in the last half-hour.” 

Gideon kept storming towards the changing rooms, but slowed a little, tucking her motorcycle jacket under her arm. “ _Three times_?!” 

Camilla shrugged. They all had different ways of prepping for shows - Gideon’s, apparently, was wandering around and completely losing track of time like a fucking idiot - and Camilla’s involved her likelihood of talking dropping precipitously. 

“I’ll get kitted up then talk to her about it. _Fuck_.” She broke into a trot that made her knee ache, and Cam somehow kept up with her without the slightest sign of exertion. If she weren’t such a good drummer, she’d probably have a great career as a horror movie villain. “Is everything set up on stage and - ” 

“Gideon! Where have you been?” 

If Ianthe was an oily ghost then Coronabeth, her sister, was some sort of gilded living statue person - stupidly tall, built like someone from a skin mag, and, most unbelievably of all, a genuinely upbeat person. She too was in almost full gear - her little cape thing swished against the floor in glimmery black fabric and while she wasn’t wearing it her golden death mask was clutched in one hand. 

“I’ve been getting here. Which took time. Sorry.” Gideon hit the door of the dressing room with her shoulder, realised it was a pull door, and sheepishly opened it. She scanned the room for her bag. “Where did Harrow put my stuff?” 

“The corner. Here.” Coronabeth’s perfect eyebrows were curved into a frown. “Did you take your bike here? Because if you did…” 

Gideon hurled her jacket aside and ripped her longsleeve top off. Fuck, she was sweating _already_. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I was careful.” Sprawled into one of the chairs and began unlacing her boots as fast as her fingers would let her. 

The frown cleared a little. “Good. Harrow’s been - ” 

She cut herself off because, like the devil being spoken of, Harrow had materialised in the doorway. Her face was an elaborately painted death’s head full of curlicues and precise detailing, dark eyes set and glowering at Gideon. Shit, she needed to keep changing. Boots off, fumbling with the buckle of her trousers. 

Camilla and Coronabeth fled, the bastards. Cor at least shot Gideon a look that was hopefully _good luck_ , but was more likely _don’t bleed on the floor when Harrow murders you because the venue will make us pay for that_. 

Gideon finished ripping her pants off and fumbled for the bag with her stuff in it. “I’m so sorry, I lost track of time, I’m an idiot - ” 

Harrow was simply standing there with the pants puddled at her feet because of _course_ that was where Gideon had thrown them without thinking. Those black lips split, and Harrow said, “You’re alive.” 

Oh. _Oh, Harrow…_ Gideon paused, black jeans in hand. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m - I’m alive.” 

Someone less versed in Nonagesimus body language might have thought Harrow was angry, looking at her. She took two brisk steps into the room as Gideon started pulling her jeans on. “We’re meant to be on stage in three minutes.” 

“Yeah. Yeah I know. I’ll just - go without the paint, maybe - ” 

“ _No_.” And _there_ was the anger. “No you will _not_ , Griddle. I’ll put it on for you. You always make a botch of it anyway. _Sit_.” 

“I should probably put my top on first - ” 

“ _Sit_.” 

Gideon sat. 

Harrow took Gideon’s set of face-paint in her tiny boney claws and dragged chair opposite Gideon, back rigid. Began setting them up. “You didn’t answer your phone.” 

“Kinda hard to on the bike.” Since that earned her a well deserved glare, Gideon hurriedly continued into, “I was driving really safely. At least ten below the speed limit. Part of why I’m so late.” 

“Mm.” Which wasn’t a promising noise, but Harrow was approaching her face with the sponge dipped in black and not stabbing her with one of the brushes, so. Could be worse. “I changed the set list. We’re playing Heralds first.” 

“But - ” 

“ _Don’t talk_. You’ll ruin the paint.” The sponge swept across Gideon’s face, and with Harrow this close she could see that her skull hadn’t started out as elaborate as it now was. She could see the layers detailing how Harrow had added to it, removed parts of it, moment upon moment of fiddling. _Fuck_. The brush came next, dripping white, sketching delicate lines of touch over Gideon’s skin. 

Harrow drew back, redipped the brush. “Heralds is first. The rest is the same.” The brush traced along her cheeks, swept up past her temple to her forehead in soft wide strokes. Gideon wanted to say something like _Heralds makes no bloody sense as an opener_ or _I love you so much I’m sorry I scared you_. But - facepainting. So instead she stared firmly at Harrow and hoped that conveyed what she meant. 

Eventually the brush lifted away and Harrow pursed her thin, black-coated lips. “It’ll do.” 

Gideon worked her jaw. “I, uh. I really am sorry I was late. I just, uh.” Shit, this was going to come across as asking for forgiveness wasn’t it? She’d meant it to be a _nice thing for my scary bone girlfriend_ moment, not some half-hearted attempt at apologising for fucking up. “I saw something you might like, it’s in the pocket of my jacket - ” 

She grabbed her vest-top-thing as Harrow gave her a dubious glare and headed for the crumpled shape of the jacket. _Vest-top-thing_ \- Gideon was sure it had a proper name but she had no idea what. It sorta looked like a bulletproof vest, or something someone might wear in a gritty post-apocalypse, so she’d nabbed it years ago and started wearing it for shows. She zipped it up as Harrow took the box out of the pocket. 

“It’s - uh. I saw it and thought of you. It’s a necklace with - it’s a little skeleton with wings, which is kinda cool I guess.” Gideon resisted the urge to rub at her face. “I know it’s lame, and it doesn’t excuse me being late, or not letting you know I was using the bike. It wasn’t meant to be about that.” 

“Gideon.” Harrow’s voice was high and clear, which in Nonagesimese meant she was choked with emotion. Which was maybe a bit much because she was already about ninety-eight percent jewelry and piercings by weight, and it was only one stupid, probably cheaply made and anatomically wrong necklace. “You need to get on stage.” 

“Right - right, yeah - ” 

“I would kiss you otherwise, and that would ruin our paint.” Her voice had dropped back to normal icy firmness. “... thank you.” 

“Yeah. Sure.” Gideon rubbed the back of her head, trying to squash her smile. “Shit, glasses - ” She fumbled her aviators on, and shot her best grin at Harrow. 

Who looked at her like she always did when the sunnies came out, i.e., annoyed but not enough that Gideon had to worry about her bones being extracted to make soup. 

“ _Go_.” 

Gideon jogged out the door. 

A few feet from the stage - shit, the lights were already down and their intro stuff was playing - Magnus was waiting with his big goofy smile and her IEM. “Cutting it a bit close?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” She grabbed the receiver, dropped it down her vest, barely caught it and clipped it to her belt. “Sorry I missed setup.” 

“You’re the one who normally likes to make sure your pedals are all set up right. And you missed out on giving Jeannemary and Isaac their autographs.” 

Distantly, from the two new terrible teen roadies lurking somewhere in the background, a wail that could have been, “ _Noooo Magnus, don’t tell her that!_ ” could almost be heard. Gideon gave them a wave and grabbed her five string from Magnus, adjusting the strap. “After the show, alright? Thanks.” 

She knew they’d have the tuning right; she didn’t need to check that. Gideon slipped up the steps to the stage. The heat from the lights hitting her like a wall. Cam was already at the kit, a shadowed shape as red and purple slipped across her like blood-stained water. Coronabeth was a shimmering shape on her right as she broke into a jog again, slipping the IEMs into her ears. 

She slipped her thumb under the string, snapped it up in a wide gesture hard enough that her calluses ached, an obscenely-low C-note ringing loud and distorted through her ears. And - yeah, the effects were a bit off, the gain was a tad too low for her personal taste, but fuck it, it still sounded fucking _gnarly_. 

They were an odd band, musically. No guitarist. Cor with all her electronic equipment. But fuck, Gideon had tried playing the guitar and it just wasn’t for her. Assholes often said bassists were failed guitarists but fuck that, she could do the techniques it was just - lifeless. A bass - a proper, growly, nickel-plated string monster - just felt _alive_ in her hands. 

Nothing in the fucking solar system could touch her when she had her bass in her hands. Yeah, she wasn’t Victor Wooten or anything, but Gideon knew she was fucking _good_. 

She gave the muffled roaring of the crowd a wide grin. They were virtually invisible in the darkness and roaming lights, just the white spots of phones piercing through her aviators. For the fucking hell of it, she stuck her tongue out, Gene-Simmons style. The face paint was bitter on her tongue, familiar. 

And as she hammered down onto a quick little octave on D#, Harrow strode on stage. Unlike the rest of them, there wasn’t _that_ much difference between her stage gear and normal clothes. Yeah, the face paint and stuff, but she wore enough eyeliner normally that there wasn’t _that_ much change. The difference was in how she held herself, how she moved, walked. Harrow wasn’t _unconfident_ off stage, but in the zone (the bone zone, Gideon’s brain said helpfully, and she smacked it with a truncheon) she walked like she owned the planet. 

Harrow’s gaze swept across them, and she nodded. 

Camilla hit the opening drum fill to Heralds like it had personally insulted Palamedes, and after three bars Gideon charged into the riff after her. 

Harrow fucking _screamed_. 

It was still amazing that she could do that. Tiny Harrowhark Nonagesimus who was barely over five feet tall, all skin and bones and big glary dark eyes. Who had a chest Gideon was sometimes sure she could wrap her hands around and touch thumb to thumb and forefinger to forefinger. That _that_ Harrow had the lung capacity to make a noise like _that_ \- a pure and terrifyingly long mid-high fry that slid down into low as Gideon’s fingers ran through the riff - yeah, there was no way Harrow was able to make that noise naturally without some kind of weird demonic pact involved. 

The amazing thing was she knew what all of Harrow’s screams sounded like now. Even as she popped off the high note in the riff, running from one side of the red-lit stage to the other, she knew this was a scream Harrow had actually fucked up slightly, that she’d probably need that lemon and honey drink after the show she fucking hated drinking because Harrow hated anything that had any taste at all. It was the kind of scream that, to the audience, to critics, spoke of heartbreak. 

It wasn’t an actual anguished Harrow scream. An anguished Harrow scream felt like crumpling metal, like something twisting out of control under her. Twisting to cover Harrow with her body. An anguished Harrow scream felt like a foot of black-painted iron railing through her chest. 

But now wasn’t the time for that. She stepped her right leg up onto the monitor speaker - weird doing that with her right leg but her knee was already making _please stop moving_ feelings so she’d give it a rest, even if it meant holding her bass kinda uncomfortably. She swung it round as the riff finished, stomping the switcher that would turn her sound from distorted fuzz to clean she could manipulate into phase and wah, ran up the diminished seventh arpeggio that opened the verse. Cor’s synths were a gentle background cry to the clatter of Cam’s hi-hat, and Harrow sung, low and rough and open. 

Gideon would win no prizes for emotional openness. But if repression was an Olympic event, she’d only get the silver, because Harrow would have torn ahead, smashed world records, and stormed away with the gold for not talking about her problems. 

Apart from in song. Apparently, whatever issues she had with talking like a human being disappeared when it came to songwriting and _everything_ poured out in a mix of Harrowhark bluntness and weird high fantasy science fiction gothic shit. 

Which was a reason Gideon didn’t like Heralds as an opener because, well. Any song about your girlfriend being so panicked with worry she didn’t sleep or drink or eat next to your hospital bed and ended up having vivid hallucinations of monsters eating her phalanges and sesamoid bones (which was how Harrow had described it, instead of saying _I hallucinated that space bees ate my thumbs_ like a normal person might) wasn’t a song she was too enthused about. 

But _fuck_ if Harrow hitting that perfect low growl with just the _hint_ of a snap at the end didn’t send lightning up her spine. 

Which led to the other problem with Heralds as an opener. There Gideon was, busting her ass, grinning at the blurry shape of the audience, running back and forth. Camilla was a blur of motion somewhere inside the cloud of flour that now surrounded her drum kit. Even Coronabeth moved a bit, though more gracefully. Harrow though. Harrow just stood there at her microphone. 

She used to joke that Harrow should’ve started a shoegaze band, back in high school. Though the less said about her and Harrow in high school the better (and about her and Harrow in primary school, or in Harrow’s first year at uni, to be honest). The _point_ was that Heralds was a song that had a groove you had to move to in the triplets and 12:8 rhythm and all the rest, and there Harrow was just _standing_ there, holding the microphone stand. Normally by about mid set she’d get a bit more mobile, which was why Heralds ended up around there, but - well, Gideon knew why she’d moved it first. 

So, sweat already pooling uncomfortably on her lower back, she stomped back into the distortion for the chorus. Bent the string until it was even less straight than she was. The keys howled and she grinned into the faceless crowd. Joined in on the harmonies on the chorus, though why Harrow had _her_ doing them when she sounded like a sacrificial goat (in her opinion, at least) was beyond her. 

When she played the last long echoing note, and the people in the cramped room roared louder than her IEMs could block out, she looked over at Harrow, pushing her glasses up from where they’d slipped down her nose. 

She was wearing the necklace. She smiled, hair wild and damp with sweat against her painted face. Mouthed, _Show them what we do_. 

Gideon stepped up to the mike, smiling berserker-wide. “Hello you beautiful bastards! We’re happy to be playing for you tonight and guess what we do?” 

There’d been a lot of debates about band names. Harrow had wanted something ominous in Latin. Coronabeth had wanted _Triplicate_ because triplets and the irony of all their surnames roughly translating to numbers divisible by three. Cam had wanted some obscure literary reference. 

But after Gideon’s first suggestion of _Frontline Titties_ got roundly shot down, they’d settled on her second suggestion. 

Gideon looked at her beautiful, wonderful singer of a girlfriend and roared into the microphone, “We do **_BONES_** , motherfucker!” 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment if you enjoyed; feedback is always welcome. Also, I should probably say _somewhere_ , but the title comes from the song _Death of Me_ by Asking Alexandria; while I enjoy their music (very few bands manage to combine 'sex and drugs and rock and roll are cool!' with 'the aforementioned things are actually fucking miserable' and pull it off), there is no doubt that Danny Worsnop and Ben Bruce are terrible people, and I don't support them as such.


End file.
